An Artist’s Growth

A few days ago, I was perusing the work of Karen Barbe (an amazing textile designer / photographer based in Chile) and came across the sweetest story that paints a perfect portrait of growth, innocence and the art of discovering talents anew:

She writes:

“During a summer in the late eighties I learned to finger knit and went crazy knitting metres and metres of scarves and headbands using the brightest colours I could find. I made lots. I didn’t sell any. But that wasn’t the point. I needed to document my work so I scouted for the most exotic location (at home) and recruited my younger sister as a model. I styled her outfit and began shooting but the camera jammed. While having the camera pointed to the ground, I tried to fix the jam pressing the shutter repeatedly without realising I was actually taking pictures! Hahaha These shoes shots look rather cool now anyway, don’t they?”

I love that Karen can celebrate this moment of creative exploration. Growing up, I had a slew of jobs and a stash of mistakes. And although it would be easy to burn the proverbial photos and gloss over that time period completely, I think it’s far healthier to sit and ruminate on those moments – when our creativity was ripe and failures aplenty.

Because even though we’re no longer children, we’re still learning and growing and changing. And someday, we’ll look back on today and realize that – like Karen – we may have been furiously snapping photos and misunderstanding technology, but we were on a journey to something beautiful.

Image Credits: Karen Barbe

p.s. Another story of creative self-discovery.